


GabeNath, the Absurdist Play

by MulliganFlowers



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Absurd, Crack, Cussing, F/M, Gabriel needs therapy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-01
Updated: 2020-07-01
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:27:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25016983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MulliganFlowers/pseuds/MulliganFlowers
Summary: Gabriel was experiencing the unbearable weight of existence. He wasn’t sure he even could put everything into words.Nathalie was driving.(Despite what the title might lead you to believe, this is not a play.)
Relationships: Gabriel Agreste | Papillon | Hawk Moth & Nathalie Sancoeur, Gabriel Agreste | Papillon | Hawk Moth/Nathalie Sancoeur
Comments: 13
Kudos: 38





	GabeNath, the Absurdist Play

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [ГабНат, абсурдистська п’єса](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24760525) by [MulliganFlowers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MulliganFlowers/pseuds/MulliganFlowers). 



> Best suited for reading out loud in a tone most exhausted and sorrowful.

Gabriel Agreste was looking at the wall. The wall was indifferent to this, and so was Gabriel Agreste. (The feeling of all-consuming emptiness overwhelmed him. Nothing could fix it, so the only thing left was to try to fill with things that were themselves empty — not to stop its growth but only to delay it. Gabriel would be worried by the inescapable fatality of this, if anything could worry him at that point.) He took his phone from his pocket and, without looking at it, dialed a number.

A phone rang behind his back.

Nathalie Sancoeur first glanced at Gabriel Agreste, who was looking at the wall on the other side of the room, and then answered the call.

“Yes, sir?”

“Take me away, Nathalie.”

“Where?”

“Away.”

Nathalie could only obey. She stood up from her chair, came up to Gabriel and took him away. For a few short moments, he still looked at the wall, but soon it disappeared from his view. Gabriel looked forward (with great anxiety, as the future always scared him). He saw some doors three times, the last ones turned out to be the car doors.

As he got into the back seat, he tried to focus on the things around him, (to catch a fleeing moment, to feel his own presence in it — his breathing, his heartbeat, his existence.) He couldn’t.

Meanwhile, Nathalie took the driver’s seat. They departed. Something in this movement disturbed Gabriel. He dialed a number once again.

A phone rang in Nathalie’s pocket once. Then again. Nobody responded.

“Why do you ignore my calls, Nathalie?” he asked, strictly.

“I’m driving, sir. It’s quite dangerous to use your phone while driving.”

Gabriel frowned.

“So what?”

“We could kill someone by accident. Or die.”

Gabriel would like to think about death, but thinking turned out to be too hard of a job.

“Fine,” said Gabriel.

“If you want to tell me something, you can do it personally.”

Gabriel pressed his lips. The intimacy of this proposal was practically scandalous. Trying not to accidentally meet her eyes, he adverted his gaze to the right window. That was the closest window to him.

“Where are we going, Nathalie?”

“Forward, sir.”

Gabriel’s brows furrowed.

“I don’t want to move forward.”

“In that case, west, sir.”

“That’s much better.”

Gabriel sighed in relief, not even noticing that Nathalie was driving forward.

He leaned his forehead against the cold window. His glasses made an annoying screeching noise, but otherwise the road was pristinely steady. Time to time, he caught a glimpse of the setting sun.

If he could stare right into it for the long time, he thought, it would burn out his eyes. However, even though eventually the buildings weren’t blocking it anymore, the sun was ahead and Gabriel was looking in the right window. He could turn his head, but was it even worth the struggle, Gabriel thought, when even then he would need to look through two layers of toned glass.

Suddenly, a cat jumped into the traffic. Nathalie hit the brakes, also suddenly.

“Merde,” thought Nathalie, but immediately deemed that thought to be too crude and improper. “Merdre,” thought Nathalie instead. Now that was a very deep intellectual thought that contained an allusion to Alfred Jarry’s _Ubu Roi_ , a quite important piece of French avant-garde theatre.

Gabriel, however, didn’t know what Nathalie was thinking. And even if he knew, it wouldn’t matter, as Gabriel wasn’t a theatre fan.

“If Gabriel was a theatre fan and watched _Ubu Roi_ , he could make better life decisions,” would have thought Nathalie, but she also didn’t know what Gabriel was thinking.

Meanwhile, Gabriel hit his head on the glass.

“Shit,” grunted Gabriel. This was a rare occasion of Gabriel saying what Nathalie was thinking.

It’s worth noting that neither Nathalie nor the cat were harmed. This sudden meeting was nothing but a tiny hiccup on of their otherwise unrelated life paths.

“There was a cat,” said Nathalie, as if apologizing. Even though she wasn’t apologizing.

“Was it necessary?”

“I know it’s strange to hear that from me, sir,” said Nathalie, “but I have moral standards.”

Gabriel didn’t answer. He would like to think about morality, but it turned out to be even harder than thinking about death. And besides that, his head hurt.

As the car drove forward, he once again turned to the window. The sun was still there, and so was Paris. He saw Notre-Dame, still burned and not yet reconstructed, emerging into view and then abruptly freezing still.

“Why aren’t we moving, Nathalie?”

“There is a red light, sir.”

“Do we really need to stop? Do we really need to obey when they order us? To live by their rules? Their morality?”

“We could kill someone by accident,” said Nathalie. “Or die.”

Gabriel remained silent. A butterfly flew by in the air. (Butterfly is a metaphor for soul.)

There was something he wanted to say more than anything, but couldn’t. (Something restrained him from that, and he couldn’t get rid of that heavy feeling in his chest. It poisoned his thoughts and clutched his throat, keeping sounds from forming into words and keeping words from forming into sentences. He thought he freed himself from that long ago, but that, as everything else in his life, was only self-deception.)

On the other hand, Nathalie. She was with him from the very beginning, wasn’t she? If he couldn’t trust her, who could he even trust?

There was something he had to tell Nathalie right now. He slowly turned his head away from the window and to her. Every slightest move was a struggle. Every simplest thought was unbearably heavy. But was there really any reason he shouldn’t have?

“God is dead,” he said quietly, as if talking to himself. “Nothing matters.”

“Yes, sir.”

Nathalie answered before she could fully comprehend what was said. The green light turned on, so they moved forward, slowly picking up speed.

“But what do you mean by that?”

Gabriel looked right in the rearview mirror, searching for her eyes. As he spoke, his voice was full of sorrow.

“Do you know who Chat Noir is?” He paused. Their eyes met for a moment (hers were full of fear, his were empty). Then, he continued: “A **cat** holic.”

Tires screeched.

**Author's Note:**

> He came up with that one ages ago, and yet there was never a good opportunity to use it.


End file.
